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Jan 26, 2023

Researchers use Avatar’s motion AI tech to track rare diseases

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, entertainment, robotics/AI

The technology can detect disorders up to six months earlier than a doctor.

Researchers are using motion capture artificial intelligence technology that brings characters to life in films like Avatar to track the onset of diseases which affect movement, according to a report by the BBC

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Jan 26, 2023

Arizona senator pushes to recognize Bitcoin as legal tender

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, business, finance, law

Stanislav Palamar/iStock.

If the proposed legislation is successful, Arizona will become the first state in the United States to officially recognize Bitcoin as a legal currency. This would have significant implications for the use and acceptance of bitcoin within the state. Not only would individuals and businesses be able to use bitcoin to pay debts, taxes, and other financial obligations, but state agencies would also be able to accept it as payment.

Jan 26, 2023

AI lawyer cancels court date after threats of jail time surface

Posted by in categories: mobile phones, robotics/AI

Earlier this month, we reported how a program trained with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) was set to help a defendant contest his case in a U.S. court next month. Instead of addressing the court, the program, which will run on a smartphone, would supply appropriate responses through an earpiece to the defendant, who can then use them in the courtroom.

Jan 26, 2023

4-year-old boy who taught himself to read at 2 joins Mensa UK

Posted by in category: futurism

Teddy Hobbs’ IQ score, which was reported by the Times, places him in the 99.5 percentile for his age.

Teddy Hobbs’ mother, Beth, didn’t know what to make of her two-year-old toddler when he made sounds while playing on his tablet. Later, the parents realized he was sounding out numerals in Mandarin.

Now four, Teddy, of Portishead, Somerset in England, can count to 100 in six non-native languages and is the UK’s youngest member of the high-IQ Mensa society. Mensa is an organization, the largest and oldest high-IQ society, for people who score high on a standardized approved IQ test. Mensa accepts people who score at the 98th percentile or higher on an approved intelligence test.

Jan 26, 2023

Quantum Safe Cryptography — A Quantum Leap Needed Now

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, encryption, finance, information science, internet, mathematics, quantum physics, security

Whether we realize it or not, cryptography is the fundamental building block on which our digital lives are based. Without sufficient cryptography and the inherent trust that it engenders, every aspect of the digital human condition we know and rely on today would never have come to fruition much less continue to evolve at its current staggering pace. The internet, digital signatures, critical infrastructure, financial systems and even the remote work that helped the world limp along during the recent global pandemic all rely on one critical assumption – that the current encryption employed today is unbreakable by even the most powerful computers in existence. But what if that assumption was not only challenged but realistically compromised?

This is exactly what happened when Peter Shor proposed his algorithm in 1995, dubbed Shor’s Algorithm. The key to unlocking the encryption on which today’s digital security relies is in finding the prime factors of large integers. While factoring is relatively simple with small integers that have only a few digits, factoring integers that have thousands of digits or more is another matter altogether. Shor proposed a polynomial-time quantum algorithm to solve this factoring problem. I’ll leave it to the more qualified mathematicians to explain the theory behind this algorithm but suffice it to say that when coupled with a quantum computer, Shor’s Algorithm drastically reduces the time it would take to factor these larger integers by multiple orders of magnitude.

Prior to Shor’s Algorithm, for example, the most powerful computer today would take millions of years to find the prime factors of a 2048-bit composite integer. Without Shor’s algorithm, even quantum computers would take such an inordinate amount of time to accomplish the task as to render it unusable by bad actors. With Shor’s Algorithm, this same factoring can potentially be accomplished in a matter of hours.

Jan 26, 2023

We Forgot To Give Neural Networks The Ability To Forget

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

A conversation about artificial intelligence’s current inability to forget and what this means for the right to privacy and user agency. Miguel Luengo-Oroz, AI expert and social entrepreneur, speaks with Ashoka’s Hanae Baruchel. (Full bio below.)

Hanae Baruchel: ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) apps have been making headlines recently because of their unprecedented ability to have coherent conversations with humans. You had an interaction of your own recently.

Miguel Luengo-Oroz: Yes, I asked GPT-3 “Can neural networks forget?” and its response was that “Artificial intelligence systems, like neural networks, do not have the ability to forget in the same way that humans do. The network may adjust its weights to better fit the new data, which could result in it making different predictions for the same input. However, this is not the same as forgetting in the sense that the network still has access to all of the information it has learned previously, it is just prioritizing the new information more highly.”

Jan 26, 2023

No, Earth’s Inner Core Is Not Reversing The Direction Of Its Spin

Posted by in category: futurism

Science is hard. Writing about science can be hard too, although it’s almost never as hard as doing actual science. And yet we science writers tend to get the science wrong a lot. This appears to be the case, to a rather stunning extent, in the instance of the reporting this week around new findings that researchers say shows the rotation of Earth’s inner core is slowing down relative to the spin of the mantle above it.

It helps to visualize this: Earth’s inner core is a solid ball that is surrounded by a fluid outer core. This is how it can rotate at a different pace compared to the planet’s outer layers — it’s essentially spinning at its own pace in a molten ocean at the center of our world… More.

Jan 26, 2023

This startup hopes to take on Canva, raising an $11.6M Series A for its design platform

Posted by in category: futurism

Despite Canva being worth in the region of $26 billion, it appears startups feel there is still plenty to be mined from this ;easy-to-use design platform’ arena. Admittedly, Professional Adobe tools remain fiddly for most people. Perhaps that’s why Berlin-based startup.

Kittl has now raised an €10.8 million ($11.6 million) Series A for its design platform which it claims allow people to “easily turn ideas into graphic products”.

The latest funding round was led by Left Lane Capital. Also participating was Europe’s Speedinvest and a number of angel investors including Intercom Co-Founder Des Traynor, former Bebo CEO Shaan Puri, and product leaders from Calm, Amazon and Instagram.

Jan 26, 2023

European banks struggle with AI, while US banks lead the field, according to a new index

Posted by in categories: finance, robotics/AI

In the wake of a seminal wave of new artificial intelligence startups such as OpenAI, a new U.K. company claims it can track and rank banks on their ability to develop and deploy AI platforms. Evident, a benchmarking and intelligence company, says its inaugural Index can rank the 23 largest banks in North America and Europe on their competence in AI.

Evident, a benchmarking and intelligence company, says its inaugural Index can rank the 23 largest banks in North America and Europe on their competence in AI.

“As the real-world application of AI accelerates at astonishing speed, we believe that this transformation is too important — for managers, for investors, for society at large — to be happening in a darkened room. Our Index measures the race to banking AI maturity in a way that brings transparency to the top of the agenda,” said Alexandra Mousavizadeh, Evident co-founder and CEO in a statement.

Jan 26, 2023

Why are so many tech companies laying people off right now?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, business

Didn’t they just have record-breaking profits?

There’s an eerie similarity to the statements tech companies have made about their recent layoffs. Mainly, if the press releases are to be believed, the C-suite of every Big Tech company on Earth — well, with the notable exception of Apple, which has not announced layoffs — figured no one would ever go outside or spend money offline again after the pandemic and their various online businesses would stay just as big as they were during the heights of covid.

I do love a heavily lawyered statement that was clearly written by the public relations department! In fact, these are all so similar that they might as well have come from the same PR person… More.

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